Data communications protocols such as Transmission Control Protocol have been developed over many years. These protocols transmit data in packets, which can be lost during transmission due to a variety of factors, such as transmission errors and network congestion. To address this problem, it is known to provide data redundancy, in which a packet is transmitted more than once. For example, a space satellite can transmit a low bit rate signal over a lossy forward link to a receiving station. The satellite may not have a return link to communicate whether a packet is received. Therefore, the satellite transmits redundant packets to increase the probability of successful reconstruction of the signal at the receiving station.